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Civic media | MIT Center for Civic Media

Live blogged by Rahul Bhargava and Matt StempeckMonday, June 23, 2014 - 3:45pm

The Internet lowers coordination costs, making it easier for groups of people to cooperate and work together. Despite this, it's often been hard to apply the lessons of online cooperation to the world of civics. A set of exciting new projects and initiatives offers hope for what's possible and a clearer sense of the challenges of using the web to participate in offline social change.

Fresco News was created by 2 19 year old freshmen from NYU. The tools that exist today. But if 19 year olds are doing this, what happens after the seasoned professionals are done tearing it apart and putting it back together.

The middle was a rush of frantic coding, reporting, and research, fueled with a stream of coffee, soda, pizza and donuts.

And at the beginning were more than 20 journalists, developers, and others interested in breaking down the cultural barriers that can cause communication problems between reporters and coders.

It was a one-day hackathon at the Media Lab on Sunday, May 18, with the long but descriptive title of, “Breaking down the language barrier between developers and journalists.” (Hashtag: #Digitalfluency.)

At Theorizing the Web this year, MIT Center for Civic Media alum Molly Sauter delivered a powerful paper on the idea of "civic fiction" using the the case of A Gay Girl in Damascus (about how a white American man created a compelling fake lesbian Syrian blogger named Amina during the height of the Syrian resistance) to show how a fictional narrative co-constructed by a culturally homogenous author and audience (in this case Western) can do problematic political work by amplifying an Orientalist narrative. The result is a feedback loop through a media ecosystem that thinks its functioning as a bridge between narratives but is actually serving as a insidious mirror.

Her concepts of "civic fiction" and the "mirror figure" are important new constructs for civic media to wrestle with. At the Center for Civic Media, our standard "demo" slides feature an image of Mike Daisey holding an iPad with the caption "exaggeration and distortion," which we use as an example of ways we need to be skeptical about the way media is used for civic and activist purposes. In Daisey's case, his source was actually theater, but it was dropped into a news context—a situation he's reflected on with respect to how truth is negotiated with the audience.* Often we think about these not as fictions but little distortions that add up to propaganda in some cases. What's new about the Amina hoax in the case Molly presents is the possibility that we will all be in on it, unwittingly or not—our biases confirmed. And we won't be able to fact-check our way out of one of these feedback loops because the truth is inaccessible in a place like Syria. What if This American Life couldn't do the background research and produce a completely separate episode to retract Mike Daisey's "creative" version of the truth?

Below are my notes from Molly's talk, and you can also watch her deliver it thanks to the livestream capture.

Ethan and I have been exploring the concept of monitorial citizenship in the pursuit of a definition or roadmap for "effective citizenship." We are working on related projects trying to operationalize Michael Schudson's idea of monitorial citizenship from his book The Good Citizen, but using slightly different definitions. Ethan's project Promise Tracker, being developed by several of our colleagues at the Center for Civic Media, thinks of monitorial citizenship as the responsibility of citizens "to monitor what powerful institutions do (governments, corporations, universities and other large organizations) and demand change when they misbehave." My master's thesis project Action Path thinks of monitorial citizenship more like Jane Jacobs idea of "eyes on the street," whereby average citizens are being civic and gathering useful information in aggregate by simply "watching their kids, keeping abreast of important consumer recalls, noting how weather affects the cost of groceries or their ability to check in on family members' safety."

Both of us may be thinking of monitorial citizens in different ways than Schudson and other scholars use the term. Marc Hooghe, in a paper reacting to Schudson called "Does the 'Monitorial Citizen' Exist?" [paywalled] looks for citizens who are critical non-participants in political life, but care deeply about social issues.

This week Ethan and I read a couple of papers as part of our ongoing conversation of monitorial citizenship. Schudson, himself, kindly pointed us to an essay by John Keane, unpacking monitory democracy as a new vision of "democracy in our times." Ethan has also been eager to dive into a prescient manuscript by David Ronfeldt, which proposes a framework for societal evolution wherein networks represent the latest organization form necessary for the success of advanced societies.

Today, I'm going to talk about a tool I'm building. It's a smartphone app called Action Path. But it hasn't been deployed yet, so I can't tell you how it's revolutionized civic learning or engagement. But I can tell you about my motivation for building it. Specifically, I want to talk about the theories of citizenship which inspire me and what I see as currently missing in the landscape of approaches to civic technology, and even civic engagement more broadly.

I'm working on a project called Action Path. Similar to Promise Tracker, which will be the featured case study in this session, Action Path is a smartphone app for civic engagement. Specifically, the app uses geo-fencing, a technique based on the awareness of the user's GPS coordinates, to send notifications to users about opportunities to take quick actions in the form of polls or documentation of a local area for easy, yet contextually-relevant civic engagement. As indicated by my promo slide here, it's meant to marry mobile computing with the concept of a "Jane Jacobs Walk," whereby you only really understand a city's needs and resources through walking its streets. I hope you all agree that this sounds great... at least in theory.

But what does this look like in practice? Well, right now it looks like three two-hour public meetings per week, where I sit and learn about the ongoing planning processes in Somerville—the city where I live and hope to do my research. I am building trust with folks in the planning department at the City of Somerville and the leaders and organizers in civil society organizations who work on issues like land use, affordable housing, and beautification in different neighborhoods around town.

There are lot of conflicting agendas among these different groups, all of whom I need buy-in from in order to, 1) make sure that I have enough people test my app, and 2) ensure the app is stocked with relevant actions that a) make my partners feel good about endorsing it among their members, and b) make the city and private developers happy because the feedback will be in a form that can inform their planning processes, WITHOUT becoming overly politicized. I want to have real impact, and tying the technology to real impact is important for my research

In the end, I have to write this up as a thesis. And that means I need a rigorous study of some kind showing that people's understanding of their ability to make a difference in their city has changed.

I appreciate that this is an iterative and interactive process that demands flexibility, but it's also hard from the perspectives of design, research, PLUS overall impact. And it's actually the social processes around the technology that are harder to design than the mobile app itself.

What do I mean by memes? Well I'm talking about internet memes: cultural artifacts that are generally user-generated content that is shared widely and remixed in various ways. This should be very familiar to most people in the Digital Media and Learning community.

We've got image macros like the lolcat, we've got animated gifs, and the viral video. There are of course political versions of these popular meme forms. And I'm going to focus on three that came out of the last US presidential election cycle: "Fired Big Bird," "Binders Full of Women," and "You Didn't Build That."

Each of these memes mainly consist of image macros, and I'm going to feature the image macros because they are the easiest meme to produce, thus available to the most people to produce. There are several image macro meme generators online now that allow you to upload your own image and overlay the classic bold white font.

But what I want to argue in this talk is that it isn't just about the creation of these memes—which we all know is interesting and valuable—it's also about the sharing of them. Sharing these memes I believe represents a political speech act itself, which generates political discourse of value. And just like we have low barriers to entry for creation, so also do we have low barriers for sharing with ready audiences on Twitter, coalescing into publics around hashtags, or on Tumblr, through tagging and curation.

Today's guest is Jon Rubin, who teaches contextual practice for socially and contextually engaged art at Carnegie Mellon. This is a live blog by Rahul Bhargava, Catherine D'Ignazio, and others - don't be surprised by typos or inconsistent tone!

Conflict Kitchen came out of what they don't have in Pittsburgh. They've never sent out a press release, but coverage has never stopped (AP, A Jazeera). Jon shows us an al Jazeera clip about Conflict Kitchen to introduce the project:

News coverage about the killing of Trayvon Martin started as a short-lived, local
Florida news piece, but through strategic activation of traditional broadcast media and
participatory online activism, eventually became
the most-widely covered story about race in the last five years. The story drew
immense coverage from professional journalists and active public engagement online and
offline, offering a potent case study for examining the role and influence of
participatory media on media agendas.

To make this research possible, we’ve been building Media Cloud with colleagues at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and
Society. It’s a toolset for rigorous, quantitative studies of media agendas
and frames. Media Cloud collects stories from a corpus of more than 27,000 mainstream
media and blog sources, and uses a link-following methodology to expand the corpus to
other relevant sources.

The first major
analysis to use Media Cloud’s tools for the purposes of “controversy
mapping” considered the emergence in nontraditional, online media of opposition
to proposed SOPA-PIPA legislation. In contrast to SOPA-PIPA, the Trayvon Martin story
occurred and unfolded substantially offline: the shooting of a black teenager
eventually sparked a national debate across multiple media channels, in rallies and
marches, and in the speeches and actions of major political figures. Initially, the
story passed with little notice, but the efforts of a small pro bono team of
lawyers and publicists attracted the national limelight. From there, the Trayvon Martin
story spread to broader audiences through a widely signed online petition, 24x7 cable
news coverage, multiple activist campaigns including competing political agendas pushed
by participatory media, a deeply emotional response from President Obama, and a widely
televised criminal trial.